Mammoth-carved bone not a forgery

In early 2009, local fossil collector James Kennedy cleaned off an old bone he found two years earlier and noticed some lines on it — lines that turned out to be a clear etching of a walking mammoth with tusks.

The location where he found it hasn’t been disclosed, except that it came from an area north of Vero Beach.

University of Florida researchers scrutinized the four-inch etching on the 15-inch prehistoric bone with an electron microscope and their tests showed it to be apparently genuine.

In May, Kennedy took the bone to the National Museum of Natural History for further studies. There Smithsonian Institution archaeologists made a copy and used advanced techniques to look at the etching.

“We have found no traces that would indicate that a (modern) metal tool was used to carve the bone,” said the institution’s Dennis Stanford, who specializes in early North American archaeology.

“While we see no evidence that it is a forgery” the institution doesn’t authenticate objects unless they are donated to the museum, Stanford wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.